No Place Like Earth

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ON THE left bank lay the ruins of a great city. According to the Martians it was called something like Thalkia. It was unlike any waterside city, unlike, indeed, any city that Bert had seen on Earth. There were no vestiges or signs of quays. Instead, half a dozen stone-paved roads, ramps with low walls ran from the land into the water. Looking over the side of the boat one could follow them down into the murky depths. From them Bert had deduced that the Great Ones who had built the city had employed some kind of amphibious craft, able to run from the canal into the market-places or wherever it was that the cargoes were needed. It was just another of those hints about the Great Ones that, put together, added up to practically nothing.

Several times Bert had stopped there, and made his way among the ruins. They told him little: he could not deduce even the size or nature of the Great Ones. Pale red sand had crept across much of the place. Out of it protruded pillars and walls of the darker red stone, and between them the corners of fallen blocks. Here and there great lintels, architecturally fantastic, and structurally impossible on Earth, still stood. It could be seen that the Great Ones had abhorred the straight line, delighted in the subtle curve, and had had a particular penchant for a gently swelled three-sided pillar. And, too, that there was nothing ephemeral in their building notions. Allowing for the different gravity, there was a massiveness which nothing on Earth, save possibly the Egyptian pyramids, had employed. It awed Bert quite a deal to be standing in the remains of the oldest structural work anyone had ever seen. The civilisation of Earth seemed by contrast like a quickly blown and burst bubble.

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